Seriously, why are so many scholars Marxists?

A FrontPage Magazine column by Barry Loberfeld details Marx's falsification of data, the tri-part confusion in Marx's plans for who should get the wealth, the horrific results of Marxism in practice, and many ancillary things. It is, in short, an excellent read.

One quotation I'd like to highlight especially:

While many adherents of the Left made their peace with the poverty and tyranny of the Communist bloc, some did not, which to this day poses the question: How can these people continue to believe socialism a corrective for all the wrongs they denounce -- we can recall Ralph Miliband's classic Marxoid list of exploitation, poverty, war, imperialism, and the "crimes of the ruling classes" -- when these always exist pervasively in those People's Republics where every drop of capitalism, their hypothesized source, has been wrung from the social fabric? It's not so much that they close their eyes as it is that they avert them -- towards a sight in which they believe they find confirmation: the presence of these wrongs in the "capitalist West."

And who can deny it? Who can deny, say, the West's imperialism? But with this and the other stated evils, we must ask: What element of the semi-capitalist West was responsible -- the free market or the coercive state? ...

A leftist friend of mine once made to me what he thought was the perfect equivalency rejoinder to my advocacy of laissez-faire liberalism (i.e., true liberalism): Wull, it'll never be implemented in its pure form, just like Marxism. My response was like the quoted matter above, to point out that the closer a society gets to pure Marxism, the more tyrannical it gets, whereas the closer a society gets to true liberalism, the more open, tolerant and free it becomes.